


Gelasin

by mindthetarget



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Deaf Clint Barton, F/M, Major Character Injury, Pain and Tears, Serious Injuries, Tearjerker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2015-08-21
Packaged: 2018-04-16 10:08:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4621314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mindthetarget/pseuds/mindthetarget
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha is on a mission with Clint and something goes terribly wrong. Minutes count. She'll spend them with Clint.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gelasin

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to tumblr user goddramit for sending me the word "gelasin" as a prompt. Also posted on [tumblr](http://mindthetarget.tumblr.com/post/127035558440/gelasin).

Ironically, now that the sirens have started, now that the ash is falling and the rubble is crumbling, now that the sky is dark with smoke and flame, now that car alarms are echoing plaintively through the devastation, it is the single quietest moment in Natasha’s life. It is somehow as if she is in two places at once.

In one reality, she is laying on her side at the bottom of the deep crater that was the bank building thirty seconds ago, slabs of concrete and steel twisted like candy cane stripes around her, and there is a pile of splintered wood, glass, and computer parts that may have once been a bank representative’s desk scattered over her. There is a body to her right, probably the banker who had been waiting with her before the explosion. Everything is howling cacophonous aftermath, destruction, and pain.

In the second reality, she is laying on her side at the bottom of the deep crater that was the bank building thirty seconds ago, but the oceanic roar of her pulse in her ears drowns out the rest of the world and becomes an absence of sound itself. She is outside herself, aware of the innumerable contusions and small lacerations peppering her body, of the bit of blood at her ears, of the battered bones, but she does not feel it personally. The Natasha who feels pain is already disappearing, because that Natasha is useless now. She won’t be needed here.

She allows herself to exist in the two realities, to float outside and inside herself for a few moments. But only a few, and then she forces herself back into the first, the true reality, though with the pain shut down and in control of her heart rate and breathing. Pain will do nothing. She has to get moving.

She sits up, pushing debris off herself, and concentrates on slowing her pulse a little more even as she pulls the laces out of her left sneaker to tie it around the opposite ankle as tightly as she can. She rips the lining out of her zip-up hoodie, wraps it around the bloody stump where her right foot used to be in quick, efficient fashion, then reaches for her severed foot to rip the shoelaces from that sneaker as well, tying it over the whole thing once more. It isn’t the most effective tourniquet she has ever made; it won’t do much, but it might buy her a few more minutes. Minutes count.

Then she pulls her phone from her pocket. It is not damaged, buffered by the tight pocket of her jeans and cushion of her body. First, she sends out the requisite alerts, makes sure the phone’s GPS is activated to make tracing it easier, and activates her security network for “if something happens to me” just in case. Next, she dials a number from memory and covers the speaker with her thumb while she listens intently.

A buzz sounds somewhere behind her and to her left in answer.

It takes Natasha seven minutes and several more phone calls to pull herself through the debris of the bank and other bodies, and push aside more ruins to find Clint. He isn’t moving. There is a hulking, immense piece of steel and concrete shadowing his form where he lays, on his back, amidst an even darker part of the devastation. Not much light is reaching this part of the flattened, exploded building site. Natasha had been at the ground level when everything blew apart, waiting to hack the bank’s internal network for intel; Clint had been in the basement, headed for the VIP vault where the serum was being held.

That’s what it is, she realizes. The entire vault has been thrown from its place in the architecture and is on its side, amidst the rubble, and Clint is pinned from the hips down beneath it. It hasn’t entirely crushed him, supported by other parts of the building’s wreckage, but it is enough that she can already tell there will be no way to extract him without heavy equipment to assist.

He still has his phone in his hand. She picks it up at the same moment she presses fingers of the other hand to his neck, and is on some level impressed that the phone can still vibrate considering its damage, and that Clint is alive, his pulse actually bizarrely steady. She is even more surprised when he opens his eyes just moments after she touches him.

He looks at her for a moment, then around him in a quick surveying circle, and then down the length of his body to the very foreboding sight of the vault atop his lower half.

Clint looks back to her eyes and, ridiculously, he smiles. “I found the vault,” he chirps smugly.

Natasha replies without skipping a beat, “You should have been a detective.”

“Then what would you do without me?”

“Not get blown up as much, that’s for sure.”

“You’d miss it.”

“Not as much as you.”

Then they are quiet, because they both know already, intelligent and analytical as they both are, that this is it.

“Backup?” Clint asks casually after a minute. Natasha has begun to brush concrete dust from his hair.

“I sent out the alerts. It won’t be fast enough.”

“Okay,” he says, glancing down again at his hips. He hasn’t even tried to sit up, to move, because he knows that moving is a bad idea. “Okay, that’s…”

“Did you get into the vault before the explosion?”

“Yeah. Yeah, got the serum. It’s in my left thigh pocket.” He blinks and then laughs. “Which is under the vault. Shit.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” Natasha points out. She scoots around and is able to push the remainder of her hoodie underneath Clint’s head for a pillow. “SHIELD will find it later, if it didn’t break.” She arranges herself so that she can lay down next to him, one arm folded under her head, as if facing him in bed rather than on a slab of cracked marble.

“Nat…shit, Tasha. Why are you…you should be getting help, right? You got reception?” he starts, alarmed at the way she’s getting comfortable.

“I sent out the alerts,” she assures him again. “They’re coming. I can’t climb out.” She would only speed up her own bleeding out if she were to try. “It’s better we just relax and wait.” Wait, because she knows exactly how close the nearest help is, and exactly what it would take to get them out of here, and exactly how long she has and how long Clint has.

His pelvis is crushed. Judging from the angle and the depression, bone shards have probably done plenty of damage. Even if his kidneys aren’t yet damaged, the vault is keeping blood from pooling in the wrong places. Even if help arrives with something to lift the vault in the next half hour, at this point, Clint will probably lose his legs, or die of compression syndrome. And if not, he may die of compression syndrome or shock before then anyway.

She’s already lost a lot of blood from the amputation, especially after all the physical exertion of getting to Clint. She would have lost more attempting to extricate herself from the crater, and even if she had simply lain there still and controlling her pulse the entire time… They were doing this job under the radar, outside the safety net, and no one is going to get there in time to do anything for them.

She wants to be with Clint now, that’s all.

“Are you okay?” he asks her, eyes so concerned. Her archer, always concerned about her first, even when he’s the one battered and broken. That is how it has always been. Even now, when she knows that he knows he isn’t getting out of this one, he is focused on her.

She smiles, like the warmth of winter sun to him, and pats his chest. “I’m fine. I broke a foot. I’m going to wait with you.”

He smiles back. He smiles, even though he knows she means waiting with him  until he passes out, or passes entirely, because he isn’t going to survive to open his eyes again if he lets them close. She is grateful he hasn’t realized she will be closing her eyes too. She only needs to outlast him. She can do that.

“It’s quiet,” Clint observes after another stretch of nothing said. He reaches to touch his hearing aids. “I mean, it’s noisy as shit. But it’s…quiet.”

“Mmhm.” She wiggles closer and traces his jawline idly, absorbing the sensation of his scruff under her fingertips. “I was thinking that too. Peaceful almost.”

Clint grins at her. “Weird, right?”

“I love your dimples.”

He blinks at the abrupt admission, but recovers quickly. He parries with, “I love your smirk.”

“I love your crow’s feet.”

Clint laughs. “I love your broken toenails.”

Natasha chuckles and kisses his cheek. “I love your callouses.” She lifts his hand and kisses the rough pads on his fingers.

“I love your kisses,” he responds.

She leans over him to give him such, gentle and tender and with all the time in the world.

She does love his dimples. She loves them so much. His whole face folds and reshapes when Clint smiles or laughs or smirks. Sometimes when his face is at rest, he looks so solemn and intent that a stranger might mistake it for the face of homicidal plotting, which is funny, because Clint is the least murderous person she associates with. But he has dimples that can cradle her thumbs, they’re so deep, and she loves them.

She has, before, tucked her thumbs into those unique, precious dips in his cheeks, feeling them while he laughed and asked her what the hell she was doing. They’d been in the middle of a bout of mid-afternoon, lazy sex on a long, otherwise dull day, and she had been struck by the thought that his dimples made her days better, and just…touched him.

She didn’t have a good reason for it, so she had said the first thing that came to mind. “Indentations in the skin are called gelasin,” she’d informed him with factual intonation. He had laughed all the harder at the absurdity of the moment, and she had laughed with him, and then he had set to making a game of kissing “every jealous gelasin” on her body. Somehow he had found dozens.

Natasha stays close to Clint for the next forty-eight minutes. They trade “I love your” devotions for thirty-one minutes, then simply lay there when he is too tired to talk and she is beginning to feel the chill of blood loss, tepid bodies in the rubble, hands laced together over Clint’s heart, for the rest of the time. He keeps smiling at her, almost sleepily, their faces close enough to feel one another’s breath on their lips, and she is so grateful to him for being strong in the way only Clint Barton can be strong, just for her. For a while, she can pretend they are somewhere safe, in bed with the covers to cocoon them, that morning is coming and he will drive her mad drinking coffee straight from the pot again.

In the forty-seventh minute, Clint’s eyes drift closed.

“Clint,” Natasha says quickly, because she’s not ready. She thought she was. She told herself she was. But she will never be ready. She can’t be.

“Clint, open your eyes. Look at me. Please.”

He struggles, but he does. He opens those incredible, better-from-a-distance eyes, and looks into her soul one last time. He even smiles for her again, and those dimples are the cradle for Natasha’s breaths, her last breaths, the end of her, because the end of Clint Barton is the end of Natasha Romanoff.

“I love you,” she says, smiling back at him with all the steady, unwavering winter sun in her expression and in her eyes that he has told her she is to him.

His eyes crinkle with the depth of his smile, all dimples and crow’s feet and promises of laughter for years that will never come now.

“I love you too,” he manages to say with a whisper of a voice.

Then he is gone, the light is gone from those eyes, and the life is gone from Natasha’s world. She does not look away, and she is gone with him soon after.


End file.
